


East of the Sun and—

by Anonymous



Category: Sherlock BBC, Østenfor sol og vestenfor måne | East of the Sun and West of the Moon
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, M/M, Revisionist Fairy Tale
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-23
Updated: 2011-08-23
Packaged: 2017-11-03 03:08:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,691
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/376439
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p> John rather thinks he might have been something else before he was, well, John. A discarded coat, maybe, worn through at the elbows, frayed and stained; or some bright-eyed bird or mammal; or a few inky, smudged sheets of newspaper; or a handful of rich, red clay.</p>
            </blockquote>





	East of the Sun and—

**Author's Note:**

>  Deanon from [](http://sherlockbbc-fic.livejournal.com/profile)[ **sherlockbbc_fic**](http://sherlockbbc-fic.livejournal.com/) for [this prompt](http://sherlockbbc-fic.livejournal.com/10852.html?thread=53351780#t53351780). As you may have guessed, a fusion with the fairy tale "East of the Sun and West of the Moon."
> 
> Edit for art links: So [](http://numberthescars.livejournal.com)[**numberthescars**](http://numberthescars.livejournal.com) over at LJ made [this incredible mock-up movie poster](http://numberthescars.livejournal.com/8722.html) based on this fic, and it (the poster) is amazing and beautiful and everyone should go look at it and comment! Okay? Okay!

_ab initio (from the beginning)_

John wakes up, memories exploding in his mind like a firework and flaring for a moment before fading into inky blackness. 

—something seems to press down on him and it hurts his skin and causes liquid to trickle down his neck, his temples, his spine ( _ heat _); and small things that are rough when he touches them but feel soft and yielding and velvety under his feet, like they might bury him forever ( _ sand_ ); and loud, sharp cracking noises that bombard his ears ( _ gunfire_ )— 

He opens his eyes.

::

_ab extra (from beyond)_

There are some people who stand out. They can’t help it. They simply aren’t able to live only in the realms of the mundane and the commonplace. 

There are some people whose lives echo and resonate, because they are made to be the stuff of legends, of myths, of night-tales and ghost-stories. 

The world, in a strange way, recognizes them. It accepts them as brethren, as its own. It takes an interest. Because the world is dominated by humans and humans are dominated by stories.

Sherlock Holmes is one of those people. A presence so overbearing and blazingly intense that he changes the world to suit  him , rather than the other way around. His influence is in no small part due to volumes of words etched into a million consciousnesses, the whispers of ink and paper. They speak of things never written, or at least never written in this time and in this place. 

The world knows that sometimes there’s only one way things will happen; only one way the stories will carry on.

So the world makes John Watson, and offers him up like a sacrifice.

::

He gets up. It seems he has a limp, but there’s a cane standing right by the bed. A cane by the bed, a gun and a laptop in a desk drawer, a few clothes folded neatly in a bureau. This seems perfectly reasonable to John. It also seems perfectly reasonable to put on the clothes and take the cane and the coat folded over a chair and go outside.

Strangely enough, he’s not thinking anything like  _“Why am I here?”_ or  _“Who am I?”_ or  _“Where did I come from?”_ or even  _“How did I just pop into existence like that?”_ Because there’s really no question that he did. 

He’s thinking things like  _”Milky Way Galaxy—Orion-Cygnus Arm—Solar System—Earth—Europe—Great Britain—England—London—”_ and on and on until he can triangulate his position down to the street, the words thick and rich on his tongue, though he doesn’t speak them aloud. They taste of life, sharp and heady. 

::

John’s not at all sure what it takes to create life outside of the normal means—procreation, that is—but he imagines arcane symbols and rites with blood sacrifices and potions that can take some animal or object and transform it into a living, breathing, flesh-and-blood person. 

He rather thinks he might have been something else before he was—well, John. A discarded coat, maybe, worn through at the elbows, frayed and stained; or some bright-eyed bird or mammal; or a few inky, smudged sheets of newspaper; or a handful of rich, red clay. Any of these things, or all of them.

He’s vaguely aware that this might seem more than a little insane to other people. But to him it seems just as reasonable as the coat and the cane and going outside.

::

He doesn’ t remember the man Mike, but that’s predictable. He’s only been alive for a few hours. What’s surprising it that the man Mike remembers him. That shouldn’t be strictly...possible. But then again, John fancies he might see something else flickering in the man’s close-set eyes, something other than amiability and joviality. He wouldn’t be surprised if he never saw Mike ever again—if no one saw Mike ever again. If he just vanished as suddenly as John had appeared.

::

John’s life—all six hours of it so far—is full of surprises. But by far the most surprising thing is what Sherlock tells him about himself. It’s not as if John remembers anything, other than the brief flashes of sun and sand and war. But Sherlock’s deductions fall into place around him neatly and easily, interlocking and connecting until they cover him completely.

He wonders what this is what it feels like to have a past. It’s strangely constricting, but not entirely uncomfortable. As an experiment, he gives a little mental push at the bonds, as if testing their rigidity. It says something about Sherlock that the weakest point in them is the fact that Harry could be a girl’s name too. John hazards a little poke at that point and is rewarded with a most amusing display of sullen petulance courtesy of Sherlock. But other than that, the reasoning closes in on him like a warm blanket, despite the fact that he doesn’t have a past, doesn’t have a sister named Harry, has never really even been to Afghanistan. 

Except—except that he does, he has, because the marks of it are etched onto his body in scars and tan lines and posture and a million other things. It’s rather gratifying to know what they mean. To know who he is.   

John’s not at all lying when he calls it amazing, and he wouldn’t be at all exaggerating to say that it’s the most amazing thing he’s heard in his entire life. 

::

Sherlock—a man he hadn’t even know for a day—gave him his past. John doesn’t feel indebted to him, as such, but he can tell that Sherlock is a fascinating, brilliant,  unique man. And John already loves life, and if there are exciting things in it like mysterious killings and confronting criminals and secrets and puzzles he wants to to be a part of it. 

Also, there’s the fact that deep down, he kind of feels like he doesn’t really have a choice. He’s Sherlock Holmes flatmate. That’s just—what he is. 

It’ll be alright as long as Sherlock doesn’t find out.

::

_a contrario (from the opposite)_

At first glance, John Watson is rather boring. 

At second glance, he’s interesting, what with the limp and the gun and the willingness to follow Sherlock into danger.

But at third glance — at third glance a truly _ bizarre _ picture begins to emerge. Everything about John shows all the marks of the war, and even of life before the war. But there is something curiously blank about John. He never mentions his sister, or any of his family outside of the first time in the taxi. He never mentions his time in the army, or anything specific about the circumstances of his injury. He never talks about himself at all.

One of the first things John does upon moving into the flat is to warn Sherlock in no uncertain terms to never enter John’s room. With any other person, Sherlock would disregard the warning. But he can tell when some lines are not meant to be crossed. Usually he crosses them anyway, but the point is that he knows they’re there. He doesn’t know why he doens’t feel the urge to cross this one. He chalks it down to the fact that he — absurdly — doesn’t want to scare away John, but he knows John wouldn’t leave that easily.

He still heeds John’s warning. 

::

_ab inconvenienti (from an inconvenient thing)_

Every night, John falls asleep once the sun goes down, as quickly as smoothly as turning off a light. Falling asleep might not be the right words for it. It’s more like losing consciousness very, very, quickly. But it’s completely without fail: as soon as the sun has slipped below the horizon, he’ll find himself shutting his eyes. One minute he’s awake and the next — the next it’s morning and he feels like he didn’t so much as blink. 

He never wakes up in the middle of the night, or tosses and turns in his sleep. He never dreams, except for once — the dream of Afghanistan when he first woke. 

He is very, very careful to hide this from Sherlock. As time goes on, he discovers that if there’s enough light, he can keep himself conscious at nighttime. It helps if he keeps moving — on a case with Sherlock, chasing some criminal all over London. The adrenaline gives him an extra surge of strength and buys him time, but each minute past sundown is more and more of strain. His body gets sluggish and clumsy, his tongue thick and dry in his mouth. If it gets bad enough he loses the ability to form words. Then comes the trouble breathing, and his thoughts begin to meander until he can barely string two words together even if his mouth would open. 

Like a clockwork toy running down.

So whenever he sees the last rays of sunlight filter down through fog and reflect off the buildings opposite so just a pale gleam of gold lights 221B, he makes some excuse to Sherlock and retreats to his room with his laptop as if he’s intending to blog. But instead he just lays down on his bed just in case Sherlock looks in — which is unlikely — it will at least look like John is asleep .

At least in that way it’s rather lucky normal sleeping habits are something that Sherlock never really grasped. He seems to write off John’s peculiar habit as a a boring thing that normal people do, because sleep is boring in Sherlock’s world.

::

_a capite ad calcem (from head to heel)_

It’s after the pool — not even late at night anymore, more like early morning — and one minute John’s brain is thinking of nothing more that getting up to his room before he passes out, or shuts down, or whatever it is that he does; and then he kind of  stumbles and automatically throws his hands out to cushion his fall while Sherlock reaches out to steady him, his coat sleeve hitching up just a little. 

He’s not sure how it happens, but John’s fingers brush the inside of Sherlock’s wrist right in the area of bare skin between coat sleeve and glove and he can feel Sherlock’s pulse through the tips of his fingers, can feel blood pound through his veins under cover of thin, sensitive skin and delicate bones. The very touch is practically burning his fingers, and he shifts his hand just a little, blunt nails barely scraping the skin. It’s true he’s not in the most coherent state of mind, but there’s no way he can miss the little involuntary jerk and shiver that courses through Sherlock’s body, any more than he can miss the minute inhale of breath Sherlock gives. 

For one brief, sparkling moment everything hangs motionless and tenuous, filled with possibility. 

And then he’s got Sherlock’s wrist in a bruising grip and Sherlock is roughly dragging a hand through John’s hair and they’re stumbling together now, legs tangling together and faces pressed close, lips clashing in messy kisses full of heat and desperation. 

By the time they reach Sherlock’s bedroom — the closest one — they’ve already shed their clothes all over the flat and there’s nothing to do but tumble into bed together and learn everything.   

It’s like a hot wire run through John’s veins, and for more reasons than one. With Sherlock’s hands, with Sherlock’s _mouth_ on him he doesn’t feel the pressing _slowness_ that forces his body into immobility.

 _”I’ve found it,”_ John thinks, awash in a haze of pleasure, and then can’t think anything after that because the feeling overwhelming him won’t fit into the confines of words. It swells against the inside of his ribs, wordless and joyful, and bursts out into the open air, spreading its wings, and settles neatly into the space of 221B, where it fits perfectly.  _Found it, found it..._

He’s nearly positive he hears Sherlock say, in choked, nearly panicked tone like the words are being torn out of him

“You — I thought Moriarty — I thought you — I thought — I would — almost lost you — “

And he’s nearly positive that what he says back is 

_“Never.”_

::

Surprisingly, Sherlock falls asleep like a log right afterward. They’re still all tangled together, sticky and bonelessly exhausted, but John feels his vision begin to dim and his breathing begin to slow and he knows his borrowed time is used up. A rush of sheer, instinctual panic — panic at being discovered, at revealing this part of himself to Sherlock — fills him, and he doesn't even think. It's pure fight-or-flight response, the urge to run and hide like an animal about to die, and he’s out of his mind with terror because every nerve in his body is screaming that as much as Sherlock is  _right _ , letting him find out about John’s origins or vaguely supernatural, inhuman quirks is wrong, wrong,  _wrong._

He extricates himself from Sherlock and leaves him lying there, barely making it up the stairs to his own room. He can’t even get his fingers to move enough to lock the door, so he just collapses on the bed.

::

_ab hinc (from here on)_

John wakes up, showers, and dresses in a numb stupor. He can hear all the while Sherlock banging around in the kitchen, obviously in a foul mood. Unfortunately, John knows exactly why. 

Even after John is dressed, he spends another ten minutes dawdling, eventually just sitting on his bed and staring at the wall. 

Well, he has to face it sometime.

He leaves his room and goes to the kitchen.

Sherlock notices his presence immediately, unsurprisingly.

“Why?” His tone is brusque and clipped, and he’s not doing too good a job of hiding the hurt in it, though there’s no outward sign of it in his face. He turns away and begins to pace. “I know you probably only went to your room, I would have known if you left the flat, but you still — I mean, was it something I — “ He takes a breath, seemingly unable to continue. Sherlock’s not one for conventional relationships, but he’s also too possessive for his own good, John knows.

For roughly three seconds, John’s mind frantically flips through all the lies he could tell. But in the end, he decides to go with the truth, or at least as much of it as he can bear to speak aloud, making sure to look Sherlock square in the eyes. 

“It wasn’t because of you, if that’s what you mean,” he says quietly, firmly. “Never because of you. Believe, it wasn’t my choice to — leave you like that.”

Sherlock’s eyes narrow, and he looks for all the world like a bloodhound that’s just found a new trail.  

“Wasn’t...your choice?”

“No — Sherlock, please. Don’t ask. Just — don’t. It’s not something you can control, it’s not something I can change. And it’s not something I can tell you. Just leave this alone.” He supposes he means the words to sound stern, but they mostly just come out tired. And maybe just a tiny bit desperate. 

Sherlock subjects John to his most intense stare.

“John...” John tenses, not knowing what he’s going to hear next. “John, you know — it’s all fine.”

He grins the grin of someone sharing a private joke with a friend, and John, after a moment, grins back.

Yes. It’s all fine. It will all be fine. Everything is good, everything is well. He is safe and he is home.

_I’ve found it._

::

_ab origine (from the source)_

Each night from then on, as they lie in Sherlock’s bed basking in the warmth and the fading aftershocks of pleasure, John will murmur a goodnight and slide out from under the sheets as he gives a gentle tug to Sherlock’s damp hair or presses a kiss to his mouth. And he will leave Sherlock’s room and go to his own, and Sherlock can hear the click of the lock as it fastens behind him.

In the daytime, in the normal course of their lives, John is affectionate. Not one inch less ready to kill for—or die for—Sherlock, but more at ease than Sherlock has ever seen him. He’s happy with what he has.   


::  


Sherlock works it out easily. The way John leaves Sherlock’s bed for his own, the way he talked the one and only time they ventured to have a conversation about it, the way he never sleeps in front of anyone, never sleeps in the daytime. The way he flatly forbid Sherlock to enter his room. And the way he retreats into that same room early every evening — normally a few minutes before sundown — and doesn’t emerge until morning. 

Well. Sherlock works out  _something_ , at least, even if he’s not entirely sure what it is.  


He means to leave it alone, he really does. But everything strange about John is gathering and pulling together, gaining mass and density. It’s acquiring a gravity of its own that inexorably draws Sherlock in. It preys on the part of him that’s spent a lifetime analyzing, deducing, laying people’s secrets bare with a single word. The part of him that must know the answer to any challenge he encounters.   


He can find out. John will never know.  


::  


It’s nighttime. Nearly midnight, just to be sure. John’s door is locked, but really. What kind of challenge is a lock? It takes barely a minute to pick.  


He turns the handle gently and steps inside.   


The first thing he notices is the utter lack of anything. It’s devoid of personal effects. There’s the laptop and the gun, but nothing else. There are no photos, not of Harry Watson or John’s college friends or John’s army friends or anyone else. Other than ” _Harry Watson_ _—_ _from Clara xxx,”_  there’s nothing to indicate that John even has a family.   


The second thing he notices is John, sprawled out on the bed. It certainly does look like he’s asleep, and Sherlock is about to leave it at that and make his exit, when he realizes something.

John isn’t breathing.

Sherlock rushes over to the bed, fumbles at John’s neck for the pulse. There isn’t one, and the skin is very cold, and very smooth, and very hard.

And that’s when he sees it. It’s like something  _moving_  beneath John’s skin. A flickering, dim sort of light. And—

—and he can see through John’s skin. It’s just barely translucent enough, and he bends down to look and sees not bones and veins and arteries and organs and muscle tissue but something  else . Wires and strands of wool and what looks like fragments of a clock, little cogs and wheels and springs, and pieces of a computer’s motherboard and pieces of a gun. Pages and pages of paper covered in sprawling script. Chunks of stone. Bullets. And throughout it all, winding lazily like a river, glimmering in the strange half-light, is sand.   


It’s more like a strange, grotesque sculpture than a man, and there are no identifiers to that it’s John at all, except for the faint outline of skin and features, molded over the rest of the miscellany like cloudy wax.  


He jerks back from the bed, nearly stumbling over his own feet, his heart pounding fast.   


_”No wonder John hid,”_  he thinks, distantly, and hesitantly approaches again, placing his hand at the pulse point for the second time.  It still feels cold to Sherlock’s touch, and stays that way for maybe ten seconds without sign of a heartbeat. Then there is a surge of warmth through his fingers, and he snatches them away and watches as translucent skin turns opaque and back to its proper color, scars and wrinkles fade back in, and John’s chest begins to rise and fall.   


::  


_ ex voto (from the vow) _

John opens his eyes.  


The first thing he sees is that it is not morning.  


The second thing he sees is Sherlock.  


::  


John’s eyes open, dart about the room for a second, and fix on Sherlock.  


And then in one flurry of movement, he leaps from the bed, seizing Sherlock’s shoulders with the grip of a vise.  


_”What have you done?”_  he snarls, so genuinely and terrifyingly angry that Sherlock has to suppress the desire to flinch, “Sherlock, can’t you leave well enough alone? You—you weren’t supposed to see!” His hands are trembling in their fierce grip on Sherlock’s shoulders.   


“John—”  


The fury drops from John’s voice, leaving a horrible forced calm in its place. He sighs.  


“If you’d only waited it would have been _fine_ —” this last word dips dangerously close to fury again.  “—but you had to know, didn’t you, Sherlock?”  


Sherlock is rapidly losing the thread of the conversation, his mind is whirring rapidly, trying to figure out what’s going  _on_. Everything’s just spinning, and whirling, and spiraling out of control so fast he can’t even register anymore. It’s the rare feeling he gets when something’s gone horribly, terribly wrong and he can’t  _fix it_.

John lets go of Sherlock’s shoulders and brings his hands up to Sherlock’s face, fumbling blindly; skating over the bridge of Sherlock’s nose and brushing his eyes, the broad plane of his forehead. John leans in and presses his lips to Sherlock’s and when he speaks Sherlock can feel every movement.   


“I have to go now.”   


“Don’t. I won’t let you.”   


John barks a short laugh.   


“It’s not my choice. It’s like a summons, Sherlock. I have to obey. Because you’ve seen, I can’t stay. I  _have_  to go.”   


“No!” He sees the face in front of him begin to shift, to lose its resemblance to John and start to become the man-shaped collection of miscellany from before. There’s a tremendous crack, and the window slams open, letting a gust of cold night air through the room. Sand trickles through his fingers, and he grasps at it in a futile effort to hold on to  _something._

“John—tell me—tell me how to get you back! There has to be some way, there must be, I don’t care what it is—”

John’s voice sounds as if it is coming from a very, very long way away. 

“East of the sun. That’s your hint. That’s the only thing I can give you, Sherlock. East of the sun and west of the moon. Figure it out if you can.” And then, sounding very sad, he says something that sounds a lot like “above you,” and Sherlock reflexively looks up, sand swirling in stinging clouds around him.

The last he sees of John is scraps of sand and paper and string blowing away in the wind.

::  


_ab imo pectore (from the bottom of my heart)_  


“East of the sun and west of the moon,” he repeats, numbly. “Above you. Above you. Oh. Oh—”

_“—that wasn’t what he said. What he he said was—”_

“I love you. Oh. Oh no. No.  _No._ ”

::  


_ab aeterno (from the eternal)_   


As for what happened after that, perhaps it is better to take a step back from the story for a while. After all, this part is not so very much about the Sherlock Holmes and John Watson of lore, but a tale from the point of view of grief-stricken, frantic man who is not only utterly bewildered but also facing the possibility of losing the first thing that’s mattered to him in a very long time. Told from the view of that man, the story might look very different indeed.   


Sherlock Holmes is indeed the stuff of legend, but not all legends will bend to suit his whim. A few must play out in their own course, in their own time, and sometimes in the most unlikely ways.   


Because of one story, another came to life.

::  


In that time after John Watson left, Sherlock’s life boiled down to stark essentials, stripped of any excess details and flourishes.

In every spare moment, he puzzled over the words that John had left him with, and searched everywhere for a clue to their meaning. The only thing that he could find was an old fairy tale, which was no help as to where John might be. Even seeing what he had seen, he drew the line at castles and trolls and various golden artifacts. There was no denying that the reference seemed apt, in a roundabout way.

He did discover that there were any number of John Watsons in Britain—it’s not exactly an uncommon name—but none who were in the military and then discharged. There were no records of any Watson family with children by the names of John and Harriet. 

And then he abandoned any pretense at trying to solve cases and lost himself in the conundrum of where John had gone. The only difference was that with that particular puzzle, every wrong deduction and every incorrect assumption  _hurt._

But Sherlock is nothing if not stubborn, and on this more than anything he would not yield. His mind bent itself to the task without protest, a single blinding spotlight focused on the problem, searching out the one key that will unlock it. 

::

It came the day he realizes that “east of the sun and west of the moon” might not be a place. 

It might be a time. 

The sun rises in the east every day. It travels over the sky and sets in the west. 

The moon rises in the east every evening. It travels across the sky during the night and sets in the west.

When the sun sets in the west, the moon is rising in the east, and they face opposite each other. It’s at that time when anyone in the world can each the place east of the sun and west of the moon, because at that time it’s right in between the sun and the moon.

From there on, Sherlock figured it out almost easily. If that phrase was meant to clue him in about the time, he knew then that the place must be something that he would be able to discover on his own.

And he did discover it, in the most unexpected of places. But it fit. 

After all, what else is a morgue but the place people are lost to? For the most part, when people enter there, they are lost to anyone who had cared about them, lost even to their own life, and are no longer anything but a corpse.

He knew he must search the morgue, and he went then to the person who could help him do that.

What he asked for is to be let into the morgue before sunset—unsupervised. Lestrade refused outright, at first. Sherlock asked again. Lestrade refused yet again. Sherlock asked a third time. This time, Lestrade agreed. On one condition—Sherlock must solve a case for him first.

Sherlock solved the case, and that very night he went to the morgue. He found John there, in a body bag in a room down a hallway that was not there before. It was John, too, exactly as Sherlock had seen him that night: an assemblage of junk all shot through with sand. Sherlock touched his face, felt the marble-like smoothness of skin that wasn’t quite there. But John did not wake.

::

The next day, Sherlock went back to Lestrade and asked once more to be able to spend another night in the morgue. Lestrade agreed, on the grounds that Sherlock once again solve a case first. 

Sherlock did so, and went back to the morgue once more. John did not wake this time either.

::

He asked Lestrade a third time. This time, Lestrade asked what he was doing, not fully expecting an honest answer. What Sherlock said then was:

“It’s John. He’s in there.”

To which Lestrade, startled, confused, concerned, replied:

“What—how do you know? Can you—identify him?” 

To which Sherlock merely looked contemplative, and refused to answer. Lestrade, this time, agreed to let Sherlock into the morgue without asking anything of him first. 

::

As the sun and the moon hung counterweight to each other on their opposite horizons, Sherlock strode through the darkened, empty rooms that smelled of disinfectant, down the hallway that wasn’t there before, and into the room where John lay. 

He placed a hand on John’s forehead, and spoke.

“I alone can see who you are. I alone can name you. You are John Watson. Now.  _Wake up._ ”

::  


_a caelo usque ad centrum (from the sky to the center)_  


John wakes up. Or, at least, he feels like he has, but he knows that can’t possibly be right. For the first time in his life, he must be dreaming. Just like—here a pang of deep, cutting regret—when he first awoke, except these are not memories of the past he never had. These can be nothing than memories of the future he will  _never have_. 

What he sees this time is Sherlock’s face, but—changed. Where previously skin had been stretched taut and smooth over the bony frame of his cheeks and jaw, there are creases, wrinkles. There are lines fanning out at the corners of his eyes, and his dark hair is streaked with grey at the temples. 

“...John? John!” The voice is slightly different, too. It’s too hoarse, as if its owner hasn’t spoken much lately. He sounds very tired, John thinks. Or—no—yes. He does sound tired, but the sound of it is buried under the concern, the desperation, the  _exhilaration_  in his voice. It’s pure, bare emotion, open and unashamed; so very unlike Sherlock’s normal cold way of speaking that it makes John want to cry. 

There are a thousand questions he could ask right now; a thousand things he could say or do all stretched out in front of him like pathways, bright and open. 

He must be dreaming. But.  

“Sherlock?” He croaks, and Sherlock’s eyes light up. He says it again, just for the sheer pleasure of it. “Sherlock.” Fierce joy at life, at living, sweeps through him in a warm wave, and he reaches up to touch any part of Sherlock he can reach like he can’t believe his luck. But Sherlock is warm and real under his hands, leaning into his touch, that John can’t think of doing anything but pushing himself upright so he can wrap himself around Sherlock as tightly as possibly and never, ever let go.

If only he could just  _save_  this moment in complete and excruciating detail so he would never, ever forget anything about it. The smell of chemicals, eye-watering and nose-burning, the chill in the air, the fabric of Sherlock’s suit bunched between his fingers, the way Sherlock’s breath ghosts against John’s forehead, the feel of long-dead nerves and synapses firing to life again beneath his skin.

He’s so  _glad_ , so overwhelmingly happy and content in that moment that it takes his breath away.   


::  


It’s only afterward, as they’re walking back—back  _home_ —through the streets of London that John thinks to ask about the peculiar way Sherlock seems to have aged overnight.   


“Hmm? What do you mean, what happened to my face?” Sherlocks says absently, his eyes darting back and forth as if he’s trying to observe everything at once. But his gaze always does return to John’s face, his hands, his body.  


“Your hair is greying and you have wrinkles, Sherlock. That’s what I mean. Is it a disguise?”  


Sherlock slows his pace, shooting John a peculiar look.  


“No. It’s not a disguise. Time happened, John. Just time.”  


At first John can’t process the implications of this. Then his brain catches up.  


“What—Sherlock!” Sherlock stops walking, and turns. “How long was I—how long has it  _been_?”  


Sherlock shrugs.

“I don’t really know.” At John’s disbelieving look, he sighs. “I really don’t. After a while, I stopped keeping track. It was too...hard. It doesn’t really matter. It’s just time. Though Lestrade was rather displeased. You disappeared, you see, and then I stopped solving cases. Most irritating for him. Though he and Mycroft did finally give up trying to ‘talk sense into me’ after the first year or two. Well, for the most part,” he amends. “I think Lestrade was rather angry with me when I showed up at his office after all this time. He made me help out with a case before he would let me into the morgue. Probably trying to stall me. Hoping I’d get distracted.”  


John gets as far as an incredulous “stopped solving—” and finds he can’t continue.   


Sherlock simply looks at him.  


“John. I wasn’t about to let you die, or disappear,” he says, in a tone that suggests this should be obvious. “How long it took is irrelevant. We still have more than enough time.”  


After a minute, John slowly resumes walking.  


“That’s good, because it was really your fault in the first place, you know,” he says, quietly. He certainly doesn’t expect acknowledgement of this fact from Sherlock. That would be too much to hope for.  


“I know. I’ve  _known_ _._ ”  


There is a long, long silence.  


“Sherlock—thanks.”  


“Come on, John. Come home.”  


::  


Sherlock starts taking cases again, much to Lestrade’s mixed relief and exasperation. He drags John out at all hours to look at corpses and evidence and to berate suspects. That’s all right, though, because no matter how dark outside it is, John doesn’t feel even a hint of the horrible cold sluggishness. They inevitably end up chasing criminals all over London, and fall into bed together. Afterward, they fall asleep in the same bed, and John breathes and sleeps like any other human being.  


They have flaming rows over Sherlock’s inability to understand why it’s bad to have body parts in the fridge. They eat lots of take-out and watch lots of bad telly. John gets a job again and Sherlock sulks—but not for very long.

But mostly, they solve cases. That is, after all, what they do; Sherlock Holmes the consulting detective and Dr. John Watson, formerly supernatural construct, currently retired army doctor and recorder of tales. That is what they do.  


But those are stories for another time.  


:: 


End file.
